COLUMN: Bakker's guide for students – cheat well

This is an opinion piece, the views expressed in the column are are those of the writer. 

As a lecturer, you encounter two types of plagiarism among students. Plagiarism that can be proven, and plagiarism that is clearly plagiarism but can’t be proven. You should avoid the first type because you could be expelled from university. You should also avoid the second type because it is immoral, deceitful, unnecessary, criminal, and foolish. If you're stupid, you don't belong at university. If you are a criminal, neither. It also demonstrates contempt for your teachers.

Exam cheating: Ten students expelled for one semester – the number may increase

During my time at AU, which spans several decades, I have personally experienced various types of cheating and heard about similar experiences from colleagues. The worst case was a student who cheated five or more times without penalty (article in Danish). The repeated acquittal was a terrible experience for colleagues. It shouldn't be possible.

Do I report suspected or confirmed plagiarism myself, as I am obliged to do? I admit here that I rarely do so. It takes us a long time to document the cases, as we have to copy source texts, the exam papers, to formulate precisely what the suspicion is about. And I know others who are not doing their duty either. The reason is a perception that reports of even serious plagiarism by teachers have too often been dismissed. 

However, the official figures tell a different story. According to a report published in Omnibus in 2022, 38 out of a total of 245 cases in 2021 were dismissed, resulting in the student being acquitted. In 2022, the figure was down to 15 out of a total of 132 reported cases. It’s clearly more the case than not that plagiarism has consequences for students.

Now to the guide: 

One stupid thing you can do as a student is to get GAI to write your exam paper. If you ask AI to write about a general topic, it will be a boring, cliché-filled paper. You might get through if we can’t prove the cheating – but rarely with a high grade. When it comes to specific topics, chatbots often write nonsense and invent references. Some lecturers have even been confronted with fake references in exam papers to articles and books where they were listed as authors – works, mind you, that they never wrote! It's far too easy to noticeable. 

Can doubt work in your favour? 

As a student, you have the advantage that the lawyers who look into plagiarism cases apparently will not convict anyone if there is even the slightest doubt. For example, section 3 of your assignment could be identical to a section in another exam paper or in a published article – and that could be because you two obviously think alike. Admittedly, most people know that total verbal consistency across several lines can never be coincidental, but even then, in my experience, lawyers will often give the defendant the benefit of the doubt. You may have simply forgotten to add quotation marks and the source of the quotation. It's just sloppy quotation, not plagiarism.

Word play 

Some students change some keywords in another person's text to conceal the fact that the text is actually plagiarised. I had a student who was otherwise talented and linguistically gifted, but who changed certain words in copied text passages, with the result that the text became gibberish. It rarely works with words that are almost synonyms. I managed to find the original text (I won't say how) and asked the person for an explanation, and we never saw that student again.

Hire a ghostwriter 

You can also buy exam papers online, but of course, you run the risk that you are not the only one who has bought them. And it nearly always gets found out. All (?) exams are checked using plagiarism software. 

If you’re wealthy, you can also pay an academic to write your answer. But, likely, they are also plagiarising. They are pressed for time. However, if you have hired a ghostwriter who doesn’t plagiarise, this type of cheating is difficult to detect. Unless the teacher invites the student to a subsequent oral interview, but we teachers are not allowed to do that. We must report cheating to the examination officers, justify and document our suspicions, after which the director of studies will make a decision. 

Remember the course literature 

Is it cheating to use ChatGPT? No, at AU, it isn’t. The university has decided that it can be used, and I agree. However, you must be very precise in your wording about how you have used AI. You are required to include a declaration regarding your usage. Be concise, honest and complete. As an experienced teacher, you can easily see whether your stated use corresponds to the assignment you have submitted. A student who is not good at English but writes in perfect English is suspicious – unless they have specifically stated that they have used GAI for language revision. You’re allowed to do so. But write it in the declaration. Is it a good idea to make a few language errors on purpose or ask GAI to do so? Unnatural language errors reveal cheating. An incoherent text points in the direction of ChatGPT. The lack of references to the course literature is also suspicious. 

Some students have been caught cheating because there were fabricated references in their assignments. Obviously ChatGPT. Simply taking out the made-up references, as a few tried at their second attempt, also won’t do the trick. In the same way that a thief or a drug dealer doesn’t become less guilty by hiding the stolen goods or flushing the drugs down the toilet.

Are you in the right study programme?  

I teach humanities myself and tell my students that they must not plagiarise, but if they want to, they should preferably change their field of study to business or law instead, because lawyers make a living from detecting lies and cheating, and in some cases can choose to take on tasks where they themselves contribute to lying and cheating.

Do it well 

If you, dear student, are considering plagiarising, you must either do so in such a way that it can’t be detected by the teacher (but we almost always detect it), or in such a way that the administration doesn’t consider it sufficiently documented that plagiarism has taken place. 

I hope you can do it with a clear conscience. But remember, it's criminal. You are in an educational institution, and you don’t want to end up in prison. And besides, it's very time-consuming for everyone. It is disrespectful to your teacher. Not only are you stealing other people's ideas and texts, but also wasting many, many hours of university staff's time. You're mostly cheating yourself. You won't get any smarter. 

This text is machine-translated and post-edited by Cecillia Jensen